Steven Runciman was the highly erudite scholar, historian and linguist (in his work he used Latin, Greek, French, Russian, Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Hebrew, Syriac, Armenian and Georgian) who specialized in the Middle Ages, particularly the Byzantine Empire and the Crusades. After receiving a large inheritance in 1938, he resigned his lectureship at Cambridge to focus fully on his writing. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1957 and was knighted in 1958.